Drawing Relational Schemas

Abstract

A wide number of practical applications would benefit from automatically generated graphical representations of relational schemas, in which tables are represented by boxes, and table attributes correspond to distinct stripes inside each table. Links, connecting two attributes of two different tables, represent relational constraits or join paths, and may attach arbitrarily to the left or to the right side of the stripes representing the attributes. To our knowledge no drawing technique is available to automatically produce diagrams in such strongly constrained drawing convention. In this paper we provide a polynomial time algorithm solving this problem and test its efficiency and effectiveness against a large test suite.